How to Create a Monthly Report in Excel with AI

Building a monthly report in Excel often feels like a ritual of downloading CSV files, endless copy-pasting, and fighting with pivot tables. It's time-consuming and tedious. AI tools, including some already built into Excel, can transform this process from a multi-hour chore into a streamlined task. This guide will walk you through exactly how to leverage AI to create insightful monthly reports in Excel faster than ever before.

What Makes a Great Monthly Report?

Before we touch any AI tools, let's quickly define our goal. A great monthly report isn't just a data dump of every metric you can find. It’s a focused summary that tells a story about what happened, why it happened, and what you should do next. It connects your daily activities to your overarching business goals, helping you track progress and make smarter decisions.

Typically, a good report will include:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): The main metrics that define success for your team (e.g., website traffic, new leads, conversion rate, monthly recurring revenue).
Month-over-Month (MoM) Comparisons: How did this month’s performance stack up against last month’s? This provides immediate context for your numbers.
Visualizations: Charts and graphs that make trends easy to spot. A clean line chart is often more powerful than a table full of numbers.
Brief Insights or Commentary: A few bullet points explaining the story behind the data - what drove the increase in traffic or why a certain campaign underperformed.

The Old Way vs. The AI-Powered Way

The traditional way of building these reports is a manual marathon. You log into Google Analytics, your CRM, your ad platforms, and Shopify, downloading a separate CSV file from each. Then you spend hours in Excel or Google Sheets cleaning, combining, and formatting the data before you can even begin to build your charts. By the time you’re done, the data is already a bit stale.

The AI-powered approach automates the most tedious parts of this workflow. Instead of manually building formulas and guessing at the best chart, AI can analyze your raw data, suggest relevant insights, generate visualizations, and even write complex formulas on-demand. It acts as your data analyst assistant, letting you focus on strategy instead of spreadsheet mechanics.

Step 1: Get Your Data Ready for AI

Artificial intelligence is powerful, but it isn’t a mind reader. It can’t make sense of messy, inconsistent data. Your first step is to gather your data from various sources (like HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Ads, etc.) and organize it into a clean, simple table in Excel. This is the most important step - garbage in, garbage out.

Format your data as an official Excel Table by selecting the range of your data and pressing Ctrl + T (or Cmd + T on Mac). This structured format makes it much easier for Excel’s features to understand what it’s looking at.

Here are a few data preparation tips:

Be Consistent: Ensure all entries are uniform. For example, use "USA" every time, not a mix of "USA," "United States," and "US."
One Header Row: Your table should have a single row at the top that clearly labels each column (e.g., "Date," "Marketing Channel," "Sessions," "Conversions").
No Blank Rows or Columns: Remove any completely empty rows or columns within your data set. Zeros are fine, but entire blank rows can confuse AI tools.
Proper Data Types: Make sure dates are formatted as dates, numbers as numbers, and so on.

Step 2: Use an Excel AI to Create a Monthly Report

Whether you're using Excel for Microsoft 365 or a newer standalone version, you have some impressive AI-powered tools at your fingertips. Using AI for your Excel reports gives anyone data superpowers — whether you need to clean data, visualize trends or create an automatic report dashboard in Excel. Let's start with Excel's built-in feature, Analyze Data.

Using the 'Analyze Data' Feature (Formerly 'Ideas')

Analyze Data is Excel’s built-in AI analyst. It scans your data table and automatically suggests pivot tables, charts, and key observations you might have missed. It’s the fastest way to get from raw data to actionable insights.

Here’s how to use it for your monthly report:

Organize Your Data: Start with your clean data set formatted as an Excel Table. For our example, let’s use a simple marketing report table with columns for Date, Channel, Spend, and Sales.
Launch Analyze Data: Click any cell inside your data table. Then, go to the Home tab on the Excel ribbon and click the Analyze Data button on the far right.
Review the Suggestions: A sidebar will appear with dozens of auto-generated insights. Excel might show you a bar chart of "Sales by Channel," a line chart, or highlight that "Email Marketing has a noticeably higher Return On Ad Spend."
Insert Insights: If you see something you like — such as a chart of "Sales by Marketing Channel" — simply click the 'Insert Chart' button below it. Excel will add a perfectly formatted chart directly into your sheet.

You can also ask direct questions in the Q&A box at the top of the pane, like "Which channel had the highest spend in November?" or "Total sales from Facebook Ads." AI will generate an answer, often with an accompanying visual.

Leveraging AI Forecast Sheets

If your monthly report includes projections, Excel's Forecast Sheet is an excellent AI feature. It uses your historical data (like past monthly traffic or sales) and an industry-standard algorithm (Exponential Smoothing or ETS) to forecast future values.

To use it:

Set Up Your Data: You need at least two corresponding time-series columns. For example, one column for Month and another for Revenue.
Create the Forecast: Go to the Data tab and click on Forecast Sheet.
Configure and Create: A dialog box will appear showing a preview of the forecast. Here you can set the forecast end date and confidence intervals. Click Create, and Excel will generate a new sheet with a table and a chart visualizing the historical data, the forecast, and the confidence bounds.

Step 3: Level Up with ChatGPT for Complex Tasks

While Excel's native tools are great for quick analysis, you can use external AIs like ChatGPT for more advanced tasks. Think of it as a reporting consultant who can write code and complex formulas for you instantly.

Generating Advanced Excel Formulas

Struggling to remember how to write a VLOOKUP or a complex nested IF statement? Just ask!

Let’s say you want to categorize marketing spend as "High" or "Low" based on a $1,000 threshold. Instead of fumbling with the syntax, just give ChatGPT a prompt:

"I'm creating a monthly report in Excel. In column C, I have 'Spend'. I want to write a formula in column E that returns 'High' if the spend is over $1000, and 'Low' if it’s not. What’s the formula?"

ChatGPT will likely respond instantly with:

Copy that formula, paste it into cell E2 in your spreadsheet, and drag it down. The task that might have involved a Google search and some trial-and-error is done in seconds.

Instantly Writing VBA Scripts for Automation

For repetitive reporting tasks, you can use ChatGPT to write a VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macro to automate them. If you’ve never touched VBA, don’t worry - you don’t need to write a single line of code yourself.

Imagine every month you have to find rows related to a specific campaign, say "Black Friday," and highlight them in yellow.

Your prompt could be:

"Write an Excel VBA macro that searches for the text 'Black Friday' in column B for sheets 1-4. If the text is found in a cell, it should highlight the entire row in yellow."

ChatGPT will generate the VBA code. To use it, simply press Alt + F11 (or Option + F11 on Mac) in Excel, navigate to Insert > Module, paste the code in there, and then run the macro. This automates formatting rules that would take minutes of manual searching.

Final Thoughts

Creating monthly reports in Excel doesn't have to be a grind. By bringing AI into your workflow — whether it's using Excel's built-in Analyze Data feature or leaning on an AI like ChatGPT for formulas and scripts — you can reclaim hours of your time. This lets you deliver smarter reports, faster, and get back to the strategic work that actually pushes the needle.

The methods we've covered make reporting in an Excel document more tolerable. But even with AI, you're still dealing with static CSVs and manual connections. That's why we're proud of what we've built with Graphed because we wanted to solve this problem at its core. Instead of bringing the data to Excel, we connect directly to your tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Shopify, automatically keeping everything live and up-to-date. This means you're always asking questions of always-on data, not a static CSV you pulled last week. You can build entire dashboards by simply saying what you want to see and get instant insights just by chatting with your data. Our goal is to make the data analysis process effortless so you spend less time on reporting and more time making smart decisions.